Free Living Up the Street by Gary Soto

like a frayed coat in the corner. On the first day we looked carefully at leaves in groups of threes, after which the teacher asked us to describe the differences.
    “This one is dried up and this one is not so dried up,” one kid offered, a leaf in each hand.
    The teacher, who was kind, said that that was a start. He raised his yardstick and pointed to someone else.
    From there I went to history, a class I enjoyed immensely because it was the first one ever in which I would earn an A. This resulted from reading thirty books—pamphlets to be more exact. I was a page turner, and my index finger touched each paragraph before the thumb peeled a new page, as I became familiar with Edison, Carnegie, MacArthur, Eli Whitney … At the end of thefive-week summer school, the teacher would call me to the front of the class to tell about the books I had read. He stood behind the lectern, looking down at his watch now and then, and beamed at me like a flashlight.
    “Who was Pike?”
    “Oh, he was the guy that liked to go around in the mountains.”
    “Who was Genghis Khan?”
    “He was a real good fighter. In China.”
    With each answer the teacher smiled and nodded his head at me. He smiled at the class and some of the students turned their heads away, mad that I knew so much. Little John made a fist and wet his lips.
    From history we were released to the playground where we played softball, sucked on popsicles, and fooled around on the monkey bars. We returned to our classes sweating like the popsicles we had sucked to a rugged stick. I went to German where, for five weeks, we sang songs we didn’t understand, though we loved them and loved our teacher who paraded around the room and closed his eyes on the high notes. On the best days he rolled up his sleeves, undid his tie, and sweated profusely as he belted out songs so loudly that we heard people pounding on the wall for quiet from the adjoining classroom. Still, he went on with great vigor:
    Mein Hut der hat drei Ecken
    Drei Ecken hat mein Hut
    Und wenn er das nicht hatte
    Dan war’s auch nicht mein Hut
    And we joined in every time, faces pink from a wonderful beauty that rose effortlessly from the heart.
    I left, humming, for square dancing. Debra was in that class with me, fresh from science class where, she told me, she and a girlfriend had rolled balls of mercury in their palms to shine nickels, rings, earrings, before they gotbored and hurled them at the boys. The mercury flashed on their shoulders, and they pretended to be shot as they staggered and went down to their knees.
    Even though Debra didn’t want to do it, we paired off the first day. We made ugly faces at each other as we clicked our heels, swished for a few steps, and clicked again.
    It was in that class that I fell in love with my corner gal who looked like Haley Mills, except she was not as boyish. I was primed to fall in love because of the afternoon movies I watched on television, most of which were stories about women and men coming together, parting with harsh feelings, and embracing in the end to marry and drive big cars.
    Day after day we’d pass through do-si-does, form Texas stars, spin, click heels, and bounce about the room, released from our rigid school children lives to let our bodies find their rhythm. As we danced I longed openly for her, smiling like a lantern and wanting very badly for her eyes to lock onto mine and think deep feelings. She swung around my arm, happy as the music, and hooked onto the next kid, oblivious to my yearning.
    When I became sick and missed school for three days, my desire for her didn’t sputter out. In bed with a comic book, I became dreamy as a cat and closed my eyes to the image of her allemanding left to
The Red River Valley
, a favorite of the class’s, her long hair flipping about on her precious shoulders. By Friday I was well, but instead of going to school I stayed home to play “jump and die” with the neighbor kids—a game in which we’d